Stanford was awarded the 2018 New Horizons in Physics Prize by Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation for his work on improving the understanding of quantum mechanics of black holes via chaos theory.
[6][7][2] Stanford worked at Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton from September 2014 to April 2019 as a post-doctoral researcher.
[5][6] He worked with Juan Maldacena on his and Leonard Susskind's ER-EPR conjecture of the equivalence of wormholes (the ER stands for Einstein-Rosen Bridge) and EPR for quantum entangled particle pairs.
[8] During this time, he worked with Edward Witten on fermionic localization of the Schwarzian theory.
In 2019, Stanford was awarded the Gribov Medal by the European Physical Society for his work on quantum chaos and its relation to the near-horizon dynamics of black holes.